Ten Years of the DH(d) and its Disciplines

Christof Schöch
Trier University, Germany

Disciplinary Transformations?
Humanities Impact on Reshaping the Digital Humanities
Internationales Wissenschaftsforum – Heidelberg

12 Jun 2025

Opening: What’s the issue?

• It’s a pleasure to be here.
• Many thanks for the invitation and the opportunity to be here.
• Very special for me also because I just stepped down from the DHd board after ten years…
• Many greetings from Evelyn Gius, the current president of DHd, who cannot be here today.
• You see the link to the slides here, in case you want to follow at your own pace.

Slides: dhtrier.quarto.pub/dhd10

An anecdote to start with…

• Earlier this year, I spent some time in Taiwan, for a conference
• I also used the opportunity to meet up with some colleagues in DH
• I was prepared for a disciplinary difference between DH in Germany and DH in Taiwan:
• I assumed it was driven by history more than by literary studies.
• In some way, that is true: there is a huge interest in Taiwan in historical documents and prosopographic databases
• But then I had a meeting with TADH representatives, at the RCDH, at NTU.
• And it turns out: all three presidents of TADH so far have been computer scientists!
• In Germany, the DHd presidents have been literary scholars (3x: JCM, CS, EG ) and a historical linguist (CM)
• My point is: the breadth of DH always hides disciplinary trends and tensions.
• And in my talk, I would like to explore some of these tensions.

The topic: Ten Years of DH(d) and its Disciplines

• What is the ‘DH(d)’?
  • An association
  • A community of practicioners
  • A (regional realization of a) discipline
• The (etablished) ‘disciplines’
  • In the Humanities
  • As well as on the ‘digital side’

• My goal today is to talk about the DHd in its relationship with the (established) disciplines.
• First of all, when we speak about “DHd”, we may mean multiple things with it.
• It’s an association (a formal entity or institution); a community; and of course a discipline itself!
• And when we talk about “the disciplines”, we may consider both disciplines in the humanities and on the digital, or technical, side of things.
• And when trying to bring these two things together, a whole host of questions emerge!

Questions raised by the relationship between DHd and the disciplines

• Is DH a discipline, a trans-discipline, an assemblage of disciplines, or what?
• What is the disciplinary makeup of the DH(d) community?
• Whose disciplinarity are we considering? Individuals vs. community

• Now, I would love to actually answer these questions?
• But it is easier for some of them than for others.
• In fact, while thinking about and preparing this talk,
• I gave it a codename in my mind: “the impossible talk”

The impossible talk

• To address the topic of the relationship between DHd (as an association and a community) and its disciplines and disciplinarity, seemed to me, was impossible or at least very difficult, like a special kind of treasure hunt:
  • Where you are using a treasure map that is really bad and has many holes in it.
  • What is worse, you also can’t be sure that there really is a treasure.
    
• Why? For two kinds of reasons, very different from each other, but in fact related as well
• 1. First, because there is a deep-seated suspicion of displines and disciplinarity in DH.
• Or at least an ambivalence: we don’t want to be just a niche; or just a methodological or, worse, technical support () “Hilfswissenschaft”
• But we also don’t want to be a good old-fashioned discipline.
• At least I perceive it as such; and am myself deeply amivalent about this question.
  
• 2. The second reason is that we just don’t have the data to answer the many complex questions that this topic raises.
• And of course this is partly a consequence of that suspicion or ambivalence around disciplinarity.
• In the following, I’ll do my best to explain the problem and explore some beginnings of answers
• But I don’t think that, currently, much more than that is possible.

Source: Alexis Addams, Pinterest.

Overview

• 1 – Opening: What’s the issue?
• 2 – DH(d) as a discipline?
• 3 – DHd and the disciplines
• 4 – Conclusion

DH(d) as a discipline?

DH(d) has all the hallmarks of a discipline

• Associations: 2 in DACH, 34 worldwide
• Journals: 5 in DACH, 60+ worldwide
• Professorships: 40+ in Germany, many worldwide
• Study programs: 85 in DACH, 202+ worldwide
• Centers and initiatives: 40 in DACH, at least 240 worldwide

(Source: Mapping DH, 2025, and its sources.)

DHd (as an association and a community) is doing fine!

• Since DHd’s foundation in 2012, membership grows continually
• Currently, DHd stands at around 550 members
• Community of practicioners is much larger

• This tells us about the healthy membership of DHd as a whole
• Many more people:
  • many of the participants at the DHd conference are not DHd members
  • On Wikidata, 2300+ people have the “occupation” “Digital Humanities”
  • Bbut only ~300 of them are from DACH)

(Data source: DHd members’ meeting protocols, 2014–2025.)

Another sign of ‘disciplineness’: recent interest in the history of DH(d)

• 2024: History of Digital History in Paris
• 2025: Panel on History of Science and Digital Humanities at DHd2025 + Task Force ‘History of DHd’
• 2026: History of Digital History at Uni Luxemburg

 

• And of course our conference here in Heidelberg as well!
• However:
• But all of this tells us nothing about who makes DHd, in terms of the “disciplinary composition”
• And this is where things get murky: Some things we know, others we don’t know.

The disciplines within DH(d)

Of course, DH(d) is not uniform, but diverse

(Source: Patrick Sahle, “Digital Humanities? Gibt’s doch gar nicht!”, 2015.)

Exhibit #1: The DHd Working Groups (17!)

• There are no less than 17 working groups!
• Some of them could be considered to be focused on a discipline:
• “Spiele” (Games Studies) or “Film and Video”
• But most have a different kind of focus, e.g. methods:
• Graphen und Netzwerke, OCR, Multilingual DH, etc.
• Or issues: AG Empowerment or Greening DH

Exhibit #2: The DHd conference’s difficult relationship with disciplinarity

• Should sessions have a disciplinary scope or not?
• One of the ideas behing TaDiRAH was to provide a different way of putting together similar papers
  • Based on methods (network analysis, stylistic analysis, linked open data)
  • Rather than based on objects (historical events, literary texts, musical data)
• However, this hasn’t always been easy to do
  • Sessions easily revert to a disciplinary scope

(Source: tadirah.info.)

Exhibit #3: Disciplinary scope of DH professorships, 2008–2024+

• So the disciplines always come back to haunt us.
• Fot example, it is not impossible, even often quite easy, to relate denominations of professorships to disciplines.
• Some notes on the data: It comes from Patrick Sahle’s blog post on the DHd-Blog
• Some caveats apply: The data concern job postings, not currently active professorships
• I have myself added the disciplinary labels based (mostly) on the denominations, and regardless of the person’s disciplinary background who is now holding the post; I admit that they might be debatable in some cases, but overall it did not feel like a difficult task.
• Interestingly enough, quite a lot of denominations are broad (DH/CH), and among the more specific ones, linguistics is the strongest; followed by History, Archaeology, and only then Literary Studies.

(Data from Patrick Sahle, “Professuren für Digital Humanities”, 2016–2025.)

Exhibit #4: The disciplinary makeup of the DHd community

• Fachgebiete
• Fachkollegien
• Fächer

• Well, we know this a little, e.g. through a review of DHd conference participants in 2018 (But this is quite a few years old and we have a lot more members now; this is based on just over 300 people, wheras there are now 500 members);
• and in fact, what we should be looking at is not just “which Fach do people identify with today”, which is often an emphatic “DH!”“, we should be looking at the discipline of the Master’s or PH.D. degree of people. That’s where their first allegiance may be. Not exclusively, of course, but it is relevant.
• We did this at the time to argue for “Vorschlagsrecht” in more Fachkollegien;
• Many people may not know this, but DHd has “Vorschlagsrecht” at the DFG for quite a number of disciplines.
  • 1.12-01: Mittelalterliche Geschichte
  • 1.12-02: Frühneuzeitliche Geschichte
  • 1.12-03: Neuere und Neueste Geschichte
  • 1.14-03: Angewandte Sprachwissenschaften, Computerlinguistik
  • 1.15-02: Germanistische Literatur-und Kulturwissenschaften

(Data source: research on 320 members from 2018…)

Exhibit #5: DH generally or DH with a disciplinary focus? View over time

“Here we can also observe that besides the professorships called ‘Discipline X plus Digital Humanities’, more and more of them simply have the denomination ‘Digital Humanities’. (Sahle 2015)

(Data from Patrick Sahle, “Professuren für Digital Humanities”, 2018–2025.)

Conclusions and things we can do next

What can we conclude from the (limited) data?

• Institutionally: DH(d) = a discipline
  • Helpful for visibility and voice
• In practice, it’s more complex
  • DH: an umbrella-trans-discipline covering parts of many individual disciplines
  • Alternative structurings, e.g. through methods used across objects
  • More ‘Digital X’ than ‘DH generally’
    

DFG: Fachteil vs. Fach vs. Fachkollegium

• I think we need to lobby not for a new Fachkollegium “Digital Humanities”.
• Fachkollegien are quite big entities, and I don’t think we are so big; or that we really want be isolated from the other disciplines.
• And DH doesn’t fit into any one of the Fachkollegien as a separate Fach, either, because it stretches across Literary Studies, Linguistics, History, Musicology etc.
• Rather, I think we should lobby for the addition of several particular, DH-oriented subfields to existing Fächer within the Fachkollegien. For example, there is already “Computerlinguistik” in the Fach “1.14-03 Angewandte Sprachwissenschaften, Computerlinguistik”. In a similar way, I think it is time to add “Digital History” for example to the Fach “1.12-04 Wissenschaftsgeschichte” (where it would be in an interesting, equally cross-cutting and interdisciplinary company)
• or to add “Computational Literary Studies” to the Fach “1.15-02 Germanistische Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaften” (where it would be well placed, even though CLS is of course not limited to German literature, by far. But AVL might not be the ideal partner.).

Next steps: Collect data!

• Who are the people doing DH(d)
• Disciplinary background and identity
• Disciplinarity of DH centers
• Disciplinarity of DH leadership
• Where does DH(d) come from
• Where is DH(d) headed

• How many people belong to the DHd community, beyond association members? (Authors, presenters, professionals, etc.)
• What’s the disciplinary background and identity of the members of the DHd community members? (Survey among members)
• What is the disciplinary connection of DH centers? (Survey among centers?)
• What is the primary disciplinary background and identity of DHd leadership? (Associations, journals, centers, study programmes, etc.)
• Where does DH(d) come from? => Interviews with important figures in the history of DHd (cf. Oral History book)
• Where is DH(d) headed? Extrapolate from diachronic data

Thank you! Dankeschön!

• Many thanks for listening.
  
• As promised, there are probably more questions unsolved than answered, now.
• But that’s a good situation to start discussion, so I’m fine with it.